Display monitors, such as flat panel displays or other types of display monitors, present pictures or images in a display area that is divided into an array of pixels. Typically, in a color display monitor, each pixel is composed of three color elements (e.g., a red element, a blue element, and a green element). Display monitors sometimes have defective pixels, which may be visible to users especially if there are a number of defective pixels in close proximity to each other.
Users who are unhappy with their display monitors may call the customer support department of an organization that made or sold the display monitors. However, it is often difficult for customer support representatives to determine, based on conversations with a user over the telephone, whether a display monitor exhibits sufficient defects to be eligible for replacement or repair under a warranty. A customer support representative can ask the user to describe generally what defects the user sees on the display monitor. The user may even be able to manually count the number of defective pixels that appear on the display monitor. However, the amount of information that can be collected by the customer support representative over the telephone is usually insufficient to enable the customer support representative to accurately determine whether the display monitor violates the technical specification of the display monitor.
Customer support representatives may attempt to ask more specific questions over the telephone. However, asking specific questions to obtain detailed information is usually time consuming. Also, users may not have sufficient knowledge to be able to accurately answer questions. Therefore, customer support representatives generally are unable to accurately determine, based on a telephone conversation or even a text chat session over the Internet, whether a display monitor contains defects that make the display monitor eligible for repair or replacement under a warranty. If customer support representatives allow too many display monitors to be returned for replacement or repair, an organization may incur substantial, unnecessary costs in processing display monitors that should not have been returned to the organization for repair or replacement. On the other hand, if customer support representatives are too restrictive in allowing users to return display monitors for repair or replacement, customers may become dissatisfied, which may result in lost customers or reduced customer loyalty.